"Daily Mail" is an embarrassment! For example, naming Nuno Loureiro in these conspiracy theories is shameful; he was killed by an ex-colleague from IST in Lisbon due to jealousy.
Last.fm used to be special, but this was a long time ago. Just tried to login, recovered the password and seems that its just a tracker nowadays. In the past I could listen to music and drop a comment, meet new people, etc.
It still has comments on albums/songs/artists, but most of the conversations are a bit dead.
I've still been using it since it's the best service (in my opinion) for simply tracking everything you listen to. Spotify does track the same thing but they don't really let you view the information the same way. For example, there's no way to view the list of your top artists ever like there is with last.fm (I just checked mine, it's: https://www.last.fm/user/[your username]/library/artists).
Hopefully the developers being unchained from CBS/Paramount can only mean good changes are coming to last.fm in the near future.
I tried to log in, and I remembered my password, but it forced me to do an email reset anyway. I no longer have that domain/email, so I guess my data and access are lost also. Shame.
Came here to say the same. I don't even know what this product is anymore. The website makes it sound like its about music but there is no music? I'm lost.
The last time I paid for LastFM was some time in 2009...but the home page just isn't clearly telling me what the service offers.
Among the people I know still using Last.FM, it's somewhere between having statistics about your music, and a recommendation engine. It isn't about playing the music, you can do that elsewhere. But by having data on every single piece of music you've listened to, it can recommend music you will like, and potentially recommend people with shared musical tastes as well. There's a feature to compare your musical compatibility with others.
For me, many years ago Last.FM recommended this weird electronic band that I'd never heard of, with the strange name "Boards Of Canada". That Last.FM recommendation was responsible for introducing me to my 2nd most listened to band of all time (just behind NIN). 2026 is many hexagons, dandelions and an inferno later.
I hadn't back around 2008 when Last.FM made the recommendation, nor do I think I'd made the connection with Film Boards Of Canada even though we watched those films in my primary school years during class time.
Originally, it kind of worked like radio; it curated music for you, you could like, comment or skip tracks. It'd reinforce the algorithm, and you'd start finding great artists. I liked the Blues catalogue a lot, even though I was listening to reggae, ska, punk, etc. It just seemed they had the best music catalogue. I remember checking how big the catalogue was, comparatively with others, which was much smaller, but much, much better!
Today, we have Generative AI, generating an incomprehensible number of songs that no one will ever listen to.
I don't remember if I had to pay for Last.fm or not back then, but I'd definitely pay to have access to that old system.
Consequently, one of the most popular projects in the web today just merged a single thousand of lines PR to main successfully without having to go through human comments and nitpicking! Do you understand what this means?
Makes sense! I’ve worked with teams where the main bottleneck wasn’t technical complexity or even the company itself; it was a people problem.
Things like long discussions over formatting that should just be enforced by linters, pushing non-idiomatic patterns despite official docs and tooling recommending otherwise, or turning simple problems into meetings scheduled “for next week”, "in two weeks", "let's have a meeting and invite everyone" instead of just fixing the issue and opening a PR. Which sometimes takes 10 minutes!
At some point it starts to feel like responsiveness and initiative are treated as threats rather than strengths. Autonomy and ownership matter a lot more than people realize. Wonder how that'll look like!
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